Recently, I got into an argument with a random Twitter troll who, for reasons best known to himself, refused to believe that I’d ever owned a ZX Spectrum. This, despite my actually providing this rather nostalgic photo of my young self, receiving said Speccy one utterly glorious Christmas morning. According to said troll, being a fan of Dizzy is a dead giveaway that my memories are fake. It’s a weird, weird hill to die on… but we live in strange times. Anyway, it got me thinking about the first Spectrum games that I owned. I’m prone to…
We live in incredible times... Those who don’t follow my Twitter feed (where I usually package my vitriol), those who don’t speak to me regularly and thus hear my incessant ranting, and those that aren’t privy to the constant level of conversation and news dissection that occurs in my home on a daily basis, may not be aware of my views. So, I’d just like to state, unequivocally, for the record and for the avoidance of any doubt: Black Lives Matter. I shouldn’t have to say that. But I do. There are those that might…
Over a largely caffeine fuelled weekend in April, I embarked on my first non-solo game dev adventure, taking part in the Ludum Dare 46 with my long-time friend and collaborator, Lawrence Wong. The theme for this jam was the somewhat vague phrase, ‘Keep it alive’. I mean… that’s kinda the theme of every videogame, right? Game link: https://simiane.itch.io/for-ducks-sake Jam link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/for-ducks-sake Ideas… We had two main ideas at the outset, the first being a lemmings style puzzler whereby the main character would be walking around obliviously triggering death-causing traps…
Every now and again I check back on this blog and think to myself, “Oh, I must write about…” Whatever it is I’m thinking about at the time. Three years since my last post would indicate that I’ve not followed through with those inclinations… Still, here it sits, an ever present reminder that I exist and have a little space on the web. What better time than during a worldwide lockdown, where we have little to do but sit indoors staring at screens, to pick up the virtual quill? Over the last few years I’ve been hacking…
I recently ran into a problem with gulp-sass, whereby some of the partials that were being included in my main .scss file were intermittently not being found. Gulp would throw up the error: file to import not found or unreadable: somefilename What's odd about this is that not only did the files in question exist, but if I simply went in and saved any file at all that was being 'watched' by Gulp - triggering a refresh of the gulp-sass task - the files would miracuously be found and everything would work fine! Doing a bit of Googling I found…
Following on from my recent post where I detailed my approach to CFC organisation, I wanted to share some more details of my current CFML coding methodology. Today I’m going to talk a little about database interaction. Unless you’re taking advantage of ORM in your CF application, you will most likely have to spend a bit of time scaffolding your components with some standard CRUD functionality. Some developers like to use a single component to manage all database interactivity, but I tend towards creating functions for each individual component. The goal is to have a standardised set of…
I’ve been thinking recently about my coding style. I’m always interested in doing things in the most elegant and efficient way possible and the methodology I use these days is a result of many years of experimentation and refinement. I think a coding style, from formatting and file structure to app conceptualisation; is a delicate balance between personal preference and the conventional wisdom of our peers. Well structured and thought out code is easy to maintain and a joy to return to, but inconsistent code can easily become unwieldy. I wanted to share some examples of the way…
I came across a post by Adam Cameron today regarding migrating away from CFML, and the possibility of helping others to do so with some kind of project similar to the excellent ColdFusion UI the Right Way - showing how common CF functionality could be replicated in other languages. I still love CFML, but I can't deny that the community has gotten smaller over recent years and some of the work I've had of late has involved helping to maintain legacy CF based systems while new ones are being built in some other language. I'm certainly not against moving to…
ZCash launched on October 28th among some of the craziest price volatility imaginable. Here’s how I got on, mining to a ZCash pool on a Windows GPU mining rig. I’ve been playing around with Bitcoin and alt currency mining since 2013, initially building a couple of GPU rigs to mine Litecoin and then diversifying across all manner of coins and algorithms. I’ve been mining Ethereum for some time and until recently no new coin launch has caught my attention enough to move my hashing power. Recently however, I couldn’t help but notice the hype surrounding ZCash.…
I’ve been dabbling in HTML5 game development with Phaser.io for the last few months and along the way I got wind of the Ludum Dare game jam. For those who’ve not heard of LD, this is a 72 hour (or 48 if you’re brave) game jam held three times a year. The community decide on a theme, announced at the beginning of the jam, and developers of all ages and experience levels spend a weekend creating a game to fit. Along the way, people post updates of how their game development is going, and offer inspiration…